Enterprise software systems receive, generate and store data related to many aspects of a business enterprise. Reporting systems are commonly used to present such enterprise data to users in a coherent manner.
Reporting systems typically allow a report designer to create a report specification, which includes a layout of one or more report parts (e.g., sections, tables, charts, header, footer, etc.) and specifies the data which is to populate the report parts. When a report is requested, the systems provide a populated report based on stored enterprise data and the report specification. If the relevant data changes, a subsequently-generated report will include the changed data.
To facilitate report design, reporting systems such as BusinessObjects XI® interact with a semantic layer including a set of abstract entities known as semantic objects, each of which associates one or more physical entities of one or more enterprise data sources with user-friendly names. Accordingly, a report designer lays out report parts based on the user-friendly names, and the reporting system automatically generates queries of the semantic layer which will return appropriate data from the data source(s) to populate the report parts. A report specification therefore includes both the layout and the associated queries.
However, a report created based on such a report specification may only be consumed (i.e., viewed) through a proprietary client application which is designed to communicate with the reporting system. Since a report (as well as each report part thereof) may contain not just raw data, but also answers to business questions, it is desirable to provide other mechanisms for consuming a report.
Commonly-assigned, co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/752,803 describes a system which allows a user to create Web Services for directly querying a semantic layer, which in turn queries an associated data source. These Web Services may be consumed by any user interface capable of consuming Web Services. However, data returned by these Web Services lacks business context, comes from a single source, and does not include any metadata information. Moreover, the system undesirably requires increased processing by the semantic layer and the underlying database.